Chapter 19: Love as the Life of Faith
One of the most inspired chapters
in all of Paul’s letters
is that in which, as if in a sudden mood of wild abandon, he sets aside all his
theological argument and goes straight to the heart of the Christian life in
what has been called a magnificent hymn of love. It is at the end of this that
he links together the three basic realities of human experience, in which man
senses that which is eternal. There are three things, he says, which abide, or
last for ever. They are faith, hope and love, but the greatest of the three is
love.
We have already seen that faith and hope are
closely
related. But even these, so far as their Christian expression is concerned,
lose their intrinsic value unless they are directed by, and expressed in love.
As in the case of both faith and hope, we must recognize that the Christian
heritage has no monopoly of the practice of love, for it, too, is basic to the
human condition. It is out of the love of a man and a woman that the human
being receives his very existence. (The fact that sexual attraction may, in
some cases, contain no element of love in it at all, but be only an act of
lust, must not be allowed to blind us to the love that can be, and indeed ought
to be, in the marriage relationship.) This is important because it makes it
clear that the family, or basic human community, in which the newly born infant
learns to take the first steps in faith and hope, is itself created by love and
should continue to be a community visibly demonstrating love. The family
setting shows us the human situation in miniature. From this setting each
person receives his humanity, including the ingredients essential for human
existence, namely, faith, hope and love.
Wherever humanity reaches some maturity of expression,
a
high value comes to be placed on love. And wherever love is to be found, and at
whatever level it is expressed, it is to be recognized for what it is and
valued. It is false, and indeed presumptuous, to suggest, as too frequently it
has been done, that only Christians know anything about love. Jesus himself is
reported to have acknowledged that even the despised tax-collectors of his day
loved those who were close to them and who loved them in return. It is a matter
for rejoicing that love is so basic to our humanity, that it has often come to
light in unexpected places and caused faith and hope to be born again.
No one who knows anything at all about Christianity
will
want to deny that love holds the central place in it. It is the subject of the
only two commandments recorded as coming from the lips of Jesus, and finally
the New Testament makes the rather astounding affirmation that "God is
love". But it is wrong to suppose that Christianity has created love where
there was none at all before. What the Christian heritage has done is to focus
attention upon it, and then declare that something happened in the advent of
Christ which allows love to reach its highest level and full potential.
To see how the Judeo-Christian heritage has
come to center
man’s attention upon love, we must go a long way back. One of the earliest
descriptions of it in Israelite tradition has now become quite proverbial. The
quality of the relationship that developed between David and Jonathan was
unusual, because, in their situation, ordinary family loyalty, coupled with
Saul’s intense jealousy of David, should have spelled the end to their
friendship. Instead, however, the love of these two for one another attained an
eternal quality, and was cemented in a covenant. "And Jonathan made David
swear again by his love for him; for he loved him as he loved his own
soul."
When Jonathan was later tragically killed in
battle, the
love of David in mourning is expressed in one of the finest war laments ever
written, "I am distressed for you my brother Jonathan; very pleasant have
you been to me; your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women".
Even in those early days of Israelite tradition, the level to which human love
could ascend was being recognized, and already it was being linked with the
love of God. This has not always come out as clearly as it should have done in
English translations of the Old Testament, since there is no real equivalent in
English for the key word used for it in the Hebrew. It is the word found in the
mouth of Jonathan, and rendered in the R.S.V. as "Show me the loyal love
of YHWH that I may not die."
The prophet Hosea stands out as a milestone
in the growing
concern for love found in Israelite tradition. Although we cannot be quite
certain about the nature of Hosea’s relationship with his Wife Gomer, it was
probably out of the pain of his own broken marriage, that he came to see that
the love of a faithful partner could redeem a situation shattered by
infidelity. From the quality of this kind of love in the human situation, Hosea
came to discern the nature of the love of YHWH for his people, Israel. As well
as using the analogy from marriage, Hosea applied to God the metaphor of
fatherly concern, in a way which prefigured the father’s love in the parable of
the prodigal son. "When Israel
was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt
I called my son . . . it was
I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them up in my arms . . . I led them with
cords of compassion, with the bands of love . . ."
A century later the Deuteronomic scholars, living
under the
impact of prophets like Hosea, set love at the center of all that should mark
the life of obedience to which YHWH called Israel. The words of the Jewish
Shema, quoted earlier, are immediately followed by the great commandment,
"You shall love YHWH your God with all your heart, and with all your soul,
and with all your might."
These are but a few of the stepping-stones to
be found in
the developing tradition of Israel
which was destined to lead to the vibrant concern with love manifested in the
New Testament. In both the teaching and the person of Jesus, love came out
clearly into the center and at the same time rose to an unprecedented level.
Out of the Old Testament Jesus took the two basic commandments about love: the
one just quoted from Deuteronomy, and the other which lies hidden in Leviticus
among a multitude of lesser injunctions both moral and ceremonial, "You
shall love your neighbor as yourself". Jesus showed that these two
commandments belong together. The love of God and the love of one’s fellowmen,
which already possessed an incipient association in the Old Testament, were now
explicitly linked together as one. One cannot love God unless one also loves
one’s fellowmen, and one cannot love one’s fellowmen without loving God. A
later New Testament writer put it quite strongly; "If anyone says, ‘I love
God’, and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother
whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen."
But Jesus further showed that love does not
consist simply
in loving those who respond in love, or in fulfilling certain clearly defined
duties of a loving character. Love can be of such a quality that it knows no
limits at all. Love reaches out beyond duty, and of its own freewill goes the
second mile. It continues even when there is no response. It is prepared to
forgive not just seven times, but seventy times seven. It transcends all human
barriers and reaches out even to one’s fiercest enemies. The love of one’s
enemies, perhaps more than anything else, vividly demonstrates the unique
quality of love to which the Christian heritage points.
Paul’s hymn of love brings out this quality
in the words
which Moffatt rendered as: "Love is very patient, very kind. Love knows no
jealousy; love makes no parade, gives itself no airs, is never rude, never
selfish, never irritated, never resentful; love is never glad when others go
wrong, love is gladdened by goodness, always slow to expose, always eager to
believe the best, always hopeful, always patient. Love never disappears."
The parables of the prodigal son and the good
Samaritan have
long been treasured as the clearest examples used by Jesus to teach the love of
God in the one, and the way in which a man should love his neighbor in the
other. But Jesus did much more than bring new insights into the nature of love
by means of teaching. He lived the love of which he spoke in such a way that
the story of his ministry, passion and death has become the classic expression
of what love means. That which first became manifest in the human situation,
and which was reaching out to higher levels in the lives of David and Jonathan
and of Hosea, came to breathtaking expression in Jesus.
So powerful was the impact made by the advent
of Jesus that
men came quickly to believe that in Jesus the love of God for man, and the love
of man for God and his fellows, had become fused together in one and the same
human life. The tendency there has been in Christian thought, from quite near
the beginning, to depreciate the true humanity of Jesus and to turn him into a
divine being, appearing temporarily in the form of man, fails to do justice to
the magnificence, indeed the perfection, of that portrayal of love in the human
scene. The New Testament holds together in a fine balance the love of God and
the love of man. The same Gospel which says, "God so loved the world that
he gave his only Son", also puts into the mouth of Jesus, "Greater
love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."
The Johannine writings of the New Testament bring love clearly to the forefront
as the theme of the Gospel. The first letter of John speaks of love more than
anything else, including this finely worded exhortation:
Beloved, let us love one another; for love is
of God, and he
who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God;
for God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God
sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is
love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the
expiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one
another. No man has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and
his love is perfected in us.
Now while we have maintained that the love which
is central
to the Christian heritage must not be regarded as wholly different in kind from
the love which is basic to the human situation, it must at the same time be
said that the advent of Jesus Christ not only demonstrated the highest level to
which the activity of love can rise, but actually introduced into the human
scene an impetus in the direction of love which was not there before. It is the
testimony of the New Testament and of the Christian community through the ages
that the Christian Gospel delivers the man of faith from the inertia which so
often prevents him from loving his fellows. Christians have always been ready
to affirm that this in fact happens, more confidently than they have been able to
give reasons to explain it.
Part of the reason is that the Christian faith
takes
seriously what has been traditionally called the fallen nature of man, namely,
that man is a sinful creature, who does not find in himself the power to bring
to fulfillment the ideals which attract him. When he repeatedly fails, he is
often inclined to give up the struggle. It must be admitted that a certain
amount of traditional Christian talk about man’s sinfulness has led to an
unhealthy and morbid obsession with man’s weakness. But even when we allow for
this, there still remains to be made an essential self-assessment of our human
frailty, and we ignore or evade this at our peril. Whether we like it or not,
we must in honesty confess that we fall short of what we see we ought to be;
and if we are not too ready to confess this about ourselves, we are usually
quick to see it in other people. There is no need to elaborate here the various
features of the human scene, such as war, race-riots, family friction, crime,
drugs and all the rest, which make it eminently clear that the world of men as
a whole stands in need of renewal.
Because of this something in the heart of man,
traditionally
known as sin, it is unrealistic simply to exhort men to love one another,
saying, "If only all men loved one another then all our problems would be
solved". Any humanist remedy which relies upon calling man to reform
himself, and to live up to the ideal of love, may not be wholly without
success, but it still leaves man struggling in the chains of his own inadequacy
and sheer willful cussedness. To set before him ideals which he cannot reach,
virtually reduces his attempt to a failure before it has begun. The Johannine
exhortation quoted above does not do this. It specifically points to something
which happened. In the language of faith this is simply that "God sent his
only Son in the world, so that we might live through him".
If children ever learn to love their parents,
their love is
not self-initiated. They love because their parents (or someone in loco
parentis) first loved them, and, as it were, drew love out of them. What
parents do in the family setting, God has done for the human race in the
Christ-event which consummated the growing heritage of Israel.
So the
New Testament says, "We love, because he first loved us". Just how
and why the advent of Christ is to be understood as the manifestation of the
love of God, and just how it succeeds in drawing the response of love out of
men, are questions which will continue to engage the minds of men until the end
of time. The fact remains that it did, and still continues to do it. And
nothing on earth, in the present or in the future, has the power to obliterate
this thing that happened, for the Christ-event is embedded in history.
The whole complex of events to which the Bible
bears witness
is not something of man’s own engineering, but something in which man finds
himself encountered by that deepest reality whom he calls God. In this
encounter man finds himself, not condemned as he might have expected, but
accepted, just as he is, sins and all. The love of God does not say to us,
"Reform yourself and all will be forgiven." It simply says,
"Son, your sins are forgiven." The advent of Christ, an historical
event which is none of our doing, says to us that, even before we are reformed,
even before we have faith, even before we show penitence, we are accepted. This
is something of what it means to say that love is the deepest reality we
encounter, and that this love that is God has searched us out.
But now we must face one last question. Some
may want to say
that the only test of the truth of the Christian proclamation that the advent
of Jesus Christ is the manifestation of the love of God, is to be seen in the
kind of response which it brings forth from men. Do those, who take to
themselves the name of Christian, actually and always demonstrate in their own
lives the response of love about which we have been speaking? Here Christians
would like to answer with a resounding "Yes!" But most of us know that
an unqualified answer would be a piece of hypocrisy. In the long story of the
church there is much which seems to belie the claim that love is central to the
Christian faith. The New Testament quite frankly recognizes this, but seems
also quite clearly to imply, that wherever in the Christian scene we do not see
love to be central, clear and unambiguous, then we are not really looking at
Christianity. All the rest that goes by the name of Christianity is
pseudo-Christianity, hiding the real Gospel from men, and the sooner it fades
out of the human picture the better.
Yet perhaps out of Christian love itself, we
must learn to
refrain from setting ourselves up as judges, particularly on past generations,
and look amid the tremendous conglomeration of things that have been said and
done in the name of Christianity, for those places and those men and women,
where the response of love has come forth and shone in an amazing way. That
there have been and still are such, there is absolutely no doubt.
If the present challenge that the new world
is bringing to
the Christian movement is going to give it the greatest shaking it has had in
its two thousand years of history, perhaps we can rejoice. There is much in
popular Christianity today that needs to be shaken off, in the form of
superstition, hypocrisy, pseudo-piety and spiritual self-centeredness. No
Christian need fear for the ark of the Lord. In the day of reckoning only those
things will remain which have in them the power to remain because they come of
God, and those things are faith, hope and love, and the greatest of the three
is love.
God in the New
World by Lloyd Geering